Stop Smoking to Retrieve your Bitter
C Rachael Elaine https://flic.kr/p/e8x6ky
We all know that smoking is the cause of many life-limiting diseases but they take years to manifest. Short term effects are often more subtle. Smoking is accused of affecting taste and many report this but what is actually happening and is it true for everyone?
How do we taste?
We have thousands of little bumps (papillae) on our tongues and each typically contain hundreds of taste buds. Not many people know that you have taste receptors in the sides, back and roof of the mouth too. It used to be thought that you could divide the four basic taste sensations of sweet, sour, bitter and salty geographically across the tongue. We now know this was fanciful and have also identified more sensations including umami (savoury), kokumi (heartiness) and a range of others including fattiness, pungency, astringency and numbness. In the average human the taste buds renew themselves every 10 to 20 days.
The Benefits of Taste
Apart from the obvious boon of the sheer enjoyment of eating and the experiences of trying out an assortment of flavours old and new, taste has a more basic role. Each element of taste has evolved from our primitive ancestors and is geared towards our protection and survival. Sweet tastes signify high calorie food essential to giving us energy but it is the bitter taste that helps us identify potentially poisonous foods. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States also lists the ‘triggering of digestive systems that change secretions of saliva, stomach acid and pancreatic juices’ that simply kick-start our bodies into readiness to receive and process food.
What does Smoking do to our Taste?
The papillae on the tongue are sensitive to tobacco and physically start to become flattened impairing their effectiveness. The receptors in the taste buds have long been known to impaired by smoke’s chemical constituents blocking their ability to relay the correct taste signals to the brain. A study in 2008 by Venneman et al was found that 28% of heavy smokers and 18% of light smokers reported a taste loss. Perhaps the most extensive research to date was carried out in a project led by Nelly Jacob of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital APHP in France published in 2014. Around 30% of French adults are smokers. Jacob’s team studied 541 non-smokers, smokers and past smokers to determine the extent to which taste is affected by smoking and if this persisted once a smoker quit.
The Findings of the Nelly Jacob Report
The study focused on these volunteers and it returned some interesting conclusions. One was that – as expected – smoking did affect taste but it didn’t hamper the sensations of sweet, sour or salty. Indeed, it was only the sensation of bitterness that was affected. We can normally identify the presence of a bitter substance in very low concentration but this was significantly altered in smokers and past smokers. The testing involved measured concentrations of caffeine with the candidates trying to identify the flavour presented.
- 6% of non-smokers
- 2% of current smokers
- 5% of past smokers correctly identified the bitter taste
The conclusions of this study infer that the longer you smoke and the quantity you smoke has an immediate and lasting impact on your ability to taste bitter substances. They put this down to a toxic process from the accumulation in the body from the smoke that adversely affects the normal regeneration of taste buds. Some smokers do report that their taste improves once they quit but with this research on hand it seems that they are the lucky ones.
Jonathan Rosales
Susanne Nilsson
https://flic.kr/p/oMFLKY
Conclusion
We all love our food and when we prepare our meals we tend to take great pains to make them as flavoursome as possible. Reading research like this about how smoking damages your sense of taste – possibly permanently – may give you pause for thought if you’re a smoker or have a loved one who is. A further sobering thought is that by the time you’re 20 years old you’ve already lost half of your taste buds you might decide that quitting smoking is the best way to keep on enjoying the food you love.